News Comment/COMENTARI AL DIA

The Climate Inquisition/LA INQUISICIÓ DEL CLIMA

The Climate Inquisition

by Rich Lowry

Hot climate or hot sex?: The head of the UN’s IPCC Pachauri, author of the porno novel Return to Alama, has resigned for sexual harassment. Below: Are you or have you ever been a climate sceptic? McCarthy poster: Shut the hell up! Talking about our failures just helps terrorists. Dissenters hate freedom.

The ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, Raul Grijalva of Arizona, has written to seven universities about seven researchers who harbour impure thoughts about climate change. One of the targets Steven Hayward puts the spirit of the inquiry as: “Are you now or have you ever been a climate sceptic?”

Grijalva’s letters were prompted by the revelation that Wei-Hock Soon, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics whose work has been critical of the climate-change “consensus,” didn’t adequately disclose support for his research. The assumption of Grijalva’s fishing expedition is that anyone who questions global-warming orthodoxy must be harried in the name of planetary justice and survival. Proponents of climate alarmism demanding immediate action to avert worldwide catastrophe won’t and can’t simply let the science speak for itself. They have the least scientific temperament imaginable. Their attitude owes more to Lysenko, the high priest of Stalin’s politicized science, than to Mendel, the founder of modern genetics whose work was shunned by Lysenko. Roger Pielke of the University of Colorado, Boulder, has done work on extreme weather and he, too, is on the receiving end of one of Grijalva’s letters. Pielke seems a most unlikely target. It’s not that he doubts climate change. It’s not that he doubts that it could be harmful. It’s not that he doubts it is caused by carbon emissions. It’s not even that he opposes implementing aggressive policies — namely a carbon tax — to try to combat it. Pielke’s offence is merely pointing to data showing that extreme weather events haven’t yet been affected by climate change, and this is enough to enrage advocates who need immediate disasters as a handy political cudgel. It can’t be Apocalypse 100 Years From Now; it has to be Apocalypse Now. Pielke notes that neither hurricanes, nor floods, nor tornadoes, nor droughts have increased in frequency or intensity since the mid-20th century. The bible of the climate “consensus,” the U.N.’s IPCC admits the same: “There is not enough evidence at present to suggest more than low confidence in a global-scale observed trend.” It is impossible to scare people with methodological imponderables and projections showing far-off harms. So the nuances of the actual science have to be jettisoned for alarmist simplifications. The imperative is to show that climate change is an urgent public health, safety, national security, and environmental imperative. The head of the IPCC Pachauri has quit amid a sexual harassment scandal and noted in his letter of resignation: “For me the protection of Planet Earth, the survival of all species and sustainability of our ecosystems is more than a mission. It is my religion.” A project supposedly marshalling the best scientific evidence for the objective consideration of a highly complex and contested phenomenon, a religious commitment? People who run inquisitions may lack for perspective and careful respect for the facts and evidence. But they never lack for zeal.